Don’t Worry, I’m Not Dead Yet

These pieces incorporate actual letters I wrote home to my parents when I was 13 and went away to a summer camp in upstate New York for a couple of months. The text references an earlier time, when children wrote letters home and the pace of communication was far slower. I involve the viewer in decoding the buried words, as they reveal the camper’s anxieties, describing how it is a little cold up here, or how the kids are good, some of them. Both hilarious and poignant, these letters have a purity and directness that make the audience wonder about the true identity of the author – is he an innocent adolescent or a knowing adult? Layered in these works are images of foreboding forests, lonely lakes and isolated figures. A presumably festive children’s camp is seen through the eyes of a boy far from home. Ultimately, we are left to our own devices as we try to decipher these melancholic mixtures of text and landscape, order and chaos and their relevance to our own histories and adult daily lives. I’m interested in exploring the mind of myself when I was a teenager, and these letters provide a portal to address serious issues about growing up.